Choosing my new icon

According to Mirriam-Webster, there are several definitions of the word “icon.” I bring this up because WordPress gave me the opportunity to change the icon associated with this blog yesterday, when I decided to change the theme for the first time in several years. I don’t know what the theme was called. or what the

Year 6, begin!

  I started writing this blog in the summer of 2011, which means this is my sixth year of putting words and pictures here for posterity to look at some day. In 2015, my blog was viewed in 82 countries, and on every continent except Antarctica. The number of viewers has never interested me very

A hundred dozen posts

According to the counting that WordPress does for me every time I put something on this blog, this is the 1200th time I’ve done so. I didn’t know if a “dozen hundred posts” sounded any better than the title I used here, but either way it’s a lot of entries into the vast sea that

A nation in crisis

Usually, when I find out that a new country has found its way to this blog somehow, I do some online research to learn something about the newest country. Yesterday the African nation of Swaziland became the 163rd nation to be added to that list. In the first year since WordPress started breaking out page

It’s the Isle of Man, man

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been calling out new nations when they join the roster of places this blog has been. The one-year anniversary of WordPress breaking them out this way is coming up soon, and the list of countries on the list is much longer than the list not on it. Today the

Add another country to the list

I started writing this blog for fun, just a little bit more than eighteen months ago. And one of the ways that it’s fun wasn’t yet apparent back in 2011. In fact, it didn’t become clear to me until WordPress began offering information about the location of the visitors to this site, exactly ten months

A Thanksgiving geography lesson

Thanksgiving was lovely yesterday. It was filled with family, and food, and the weather was so good that we were able to get out to the lakefront for a Turkey Day run. I revived my Holder of All Stuff role from a few days ago, and everyone had a good time. I didn’t have the

Call me Mr. Worldwide

I have a teen-aged daughter who subjects me to hit radio every day, so I know all about Pitbull and his use of term in the title to this post. But, at least for today, I’m going to borrow it for myself. WordPress tracks the traffic to this blog by country of origin, and displays

The modern Great Wall

I’ve written before about how interesting it is to see where the page views for this blog are coming from. WordPress began breaking down page views by country of origin last February, and since that time, something that I created has found its way into 150 different nations around the world. The majority of these

I feel like we accomplished something

The one-day internet strike on January 18th, which I participated in by adding the “Stop Censorship” bar that still appears on this site, sending emails to my Senators, and tweeting my alarm at what the legislation meant, struck a blow for internet freedom. The sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives withdrew the

C=100 posts

This is my 100th post on this site. I started this blog on a whim last June, since I had written a story and didn’t know what to do with it. My first instinct was to send it to Baseballisms, which is another blog that has a Facebook page I read from time to time.